We love to read in our house and since long before my kids were old enough to understand what I was reading them, books were a big part of their lives. Now my nearly-five-year-old has started showing an interest in reading for herself and loves letters, the challenge of letter formation and the sounds of words. As a first-time school mum – and self-confessed book nerd – it has been a total thrill to get her little workbooks home from school this term, and to sit down with her and go through what she’s been learning in the day.

They are days ruled by fatigue; when “tired” is a sliding scale rather than an occasional visitor. Days we forget to look in the mirror before we leave the house and can’t remember where we put the car keys or the iphone or our sunglasses or our sanity.

These are days of uneaten peanut butter sandwiches and rejected veggie pasta bake and of the guilty 6pm dash to the drive-thru for chicken nuggets because you can’t remember the last time they ate Actual Food.

Every Thursday, in the yawning gap between our morning walk and nap time, we pack up your snacks and I bundle you into the car, and off we go to our local mummy and baby music class. We sit in the circle and clap our hands and sing all the songs and you dance under the parachute and pack up all the balls, and you love every moment of it. But, my sweet girl, this is my guilty secret: I do not.

Is there anything more true than the saying, “Comparison is the thief of joy”?

Having just written them down, I’m going to read those words again. Slowly.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Call it what you will. Comparison. Competition. Envy. Jealousy. The green-eyed monster. It steals. It takes away joy. It saps happiness. It lessens satisfaction. And yet, comparison is a tool we all use, every day, in every aspect of our lives, whether consciously or not. Is there a more natural instinct than to compare ourselves to others?

I wonder if the tendency to compare has become magnified with all the technology...

September has been a month of pleasant surprises and lucky breaks. Just four weeks ago we travelled “home” to the Bahamas after a month in the UK (don’t even get me started on what or where “home” is!), to find that paradise is even lovelier than I remembered and it was, indeed, lovely to be back. One forgets after time away how laid back island life is – and how good an end-of-the-day gin & tonic tastes as the sun sinks into the blue Bahamas sea.

It has been great to see the familiar faces who have become good friends over...

I do. Every few months. And while we were sorting our house out before Hurricane Irma this month, I realised how much stuff we’ve accumulated in just a year.

Anyone who has experienced a hurricane or similar act of nature’s wrath will tell you how it throws into perfect clarity the things that are most important to you. If we had been in a situation where we had to get out of our house fast, I realised that there was only one material item I would run back for: the books I’ve been writing...

The click of the front door and unexpected footsteps in the entrance hall. The ecstatic screams of your daughters as they barrel across the house to fling themselves into your arms, tripping over each other and their own feet. The sound of your laughter mingling with theirs as they knock you to the ground, pitch-perfect. You’ve skipped your workout to come home early to be with us. Is this what bliss feels like?

There are giggles, splashing and “shushing” sounds coming from upstairs. You’ve let them put bubbles in the jacuzzi bath again and white froth has spilled over the bathroom floor like the magic porridge...

Reader, ‘tis the season. As the mists and mellow fruitfulness begin to gently settle themselves on the hills in the place I was born, here we greet an altogether different season. Here we watch the hurricanes, and here it is the season of fear.

I imagine you too will have been watching the hurricanes this season. Harvey in Texas, where the flooding was as big as everything else in that great state. And Irma across the Caribbean where this weekend the tiny islands that make up paradise were left naked and utterly defenceless against the viciousness of the strongest storm ever...

About Catherine

Wife, mum, tea drinker, shoe lover, South African Brit who has just moved from Switzerland to the Bahamas. I write about life with my littles, travel, health, style, perfect cups of tea and other lovely things that bring sunshine to a life.